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boothicus.bsky.social
Bioarchaeologist. Amateur Scarecrow. Ancient DNA Lab @ The Francis Crick Institute
1,040 posts 5,187 followers 3,285 following
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This lil’ beaut lands in less than 3 weeks! It’s a funny, fact-filled guide to the Stone Age for kids aged 8+, co-written with @brennawalks.bsky.social I’d be v. grateful if you lovely peeps might pre-order a few copies, as it makes a MASSIVE difference to the success of a book — thank you! 🙏 📚😎

I have activated the Robert Smith-signal. It’s just a second hand bat signal to be fair.

I'm always impressed with the reconstructions made by the Kennis brothers, they have such character. www.belganewsagency.eu/prehistoric-...

So fun being a part of this! Amazing new data & facial reconstructions from @whatkatiedigs.bsky.social @orshicz.bsky.social @boothicus.bsky.social @crick.ac.uk @pontus-skoglund.bsky.social & the Dundee forensic artists! Go check it out if you’re in Edinburgh!

The author of this piece advocates getting AI to read for you because “the internet-era explosion of digitized text now mocks nonfiction writers with access to more voluminous sources on any given subject than we can possibly process” 🙄

🦣🏺🧪 Also relevant to #Neanderthals. Skeletal remains we do have for them include individuals well over 40 yrs old (female & male) and moreover we don't know if the sample is representative of actual demography or is biased by other factors affecting whose remains became preserved more often.

It's out! On Thursday, there was a book launch for this transformative study of how the Domesday Book was made. Astonishing that it has been possible to learn so much about something so apparently well-understood. @oxmedstud.bsky.social

The #Megalithic Origins project, funded by The #LeverhulmeTrust, has a new website! The project aims to clarify the origins of megalithic monumentality in Europe through the application of state-of-the-art OSL dating, micromorphological analysis and Bayesian modelling.

God bless Parkrun pacers.

A 4-year postdoc position in population genomics is available in my group at the University of East Anglia, to work on a project sequencing a thousand fox genomes across rural and urban environments in the UK. vacancies.uea.ac.uk/vacancies/15...

#FlintFriday. Amazing sticker made by one of my students!

I don't usually get that excited by coins and shiny things, but the iconography of this is fabulous. #ancientbluesky

Why did Palaeolithic artists decide to produce art on the same walls that someone else had decorated? Do rock art palimpsests reflect dialogues that occurred across tens-of-thousands of years? My new OA paper develops a conceptual framework to explore these dimensions! 👇🏺 doi.org/10.1007/s108...

This might have passed English colleagues by, but academic and development-led (preventative) archaeologists are united in protests across France today against changed heritage legislation in the government. Solidarity with their struggles and I hope to join them later this afternoon. 🖤

"Where’s Walh-y? Searching for ‘Invisible Britons’ in Early Medieval England". Strong title game by James Chetwood eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/22...

I primarily worry about it with respect to my own field of study, but few things better illustrate the sheer futility of making historic arguments about indigeneity/ethnicity as correlates with DNA than the way people seek to wield genetic studies in every direction with respect to Israel-Palestine.

🏺 Bit of a long, dense but rewarding slog on the genetics of Sarmatians in the Carpathian Basin. Serves them right for being so bloody complicated. www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Foxy techbro neighbours! www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

This Thursday at 5.30pm BST I'm giving an ARFA seminar via Zoom about my recent research into the misuse of archaeological ideas by the far right. Free, online and hopefully with some good discussion

🏺 Interesting study on different Yersinia pestis (plague) strains in the 5th-7th Centuries ('Justinianic') and 14th Centuries ('Black Death') suggesting that the bacteria adapts to initial high mortality and rodent population fragmentation by becoming less virulent. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Great coverage of the Edinburgh’s First Burghers exhibition in the Scotsman - it has been brilliant to see this HES-funded work go from the lab to exhibition! @orshicz.bsky.social @boothicus.bsky.social www.scotsman.com/heritage-and...

Real-time thread of some exceedingly good prehistory 🏺

Subcontinental genetic variation in the All of Us Research Program: Implications for biomedical research www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltex...

The ‘Colonel Sanders’ nomenclature feels like a step down from the ‘Van Dyke’ but a step up from the ‘Rolf Harris’ or the ‘Johnny Depp’, speaking as someone who is only capable of growing this style.

Boxer being sent off to become the comfortable middle manager of a glue factory.

Grave for three dead flies my daughter found desiccated in our back room. My Future Gothometer burst a gasket.

I had the privilege of being in the room one of the rare and exceptional times when the preserved head was brought out (the reasons were entirely legitimate, I swear m'lud!). It's difficult to express how singularly it stank up close.

A VERY fine purchase we might add (without any bias whatsoever) 😉

I'm very happy to share my new game/publication, co-authored with Digital Archaeology MSc grad McKenna Crowe: "Other Eyes: Choose your own digital archaeology paradata adventure" in @intarcheditor.bsky.social You can read the intro and play the game here: intarch.ac.uk/journal/issu...

Could be trying to maximise visitor numbers! If they’d read @adamrutherford.bsky.social they’d know that if these people have any living descendants, they would inevitably encompass a large chunk of the population of Britain as well as a fair old number worldwide.

Actually this is even more ridiculous than I first realised…

Linear projections of ethnic diversity in 40 and 75 years time depend on simplistic one drop raciak thinking about those of mixed ethnic heritage. The real life pattern of racial identity across generations is fascinatingly fluid, as I found in my own household from one census to the next

Great volunteer opportunity at the Stonehenge Visitor Centre to help build a Neolithic hall as part of their new education facilities. Find out more at - www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places...

🏺 Say? Weren’t you the guy wishing for an interactive app allowing you to explore all published ancient human genomes from Britain and Ireland? Well, thanks to the COMMIOS, now there is.

Save the date for the first international conference on palaeogenomics, bringing together all fields of #aDNA ! 🧬 Join us on June 23–26, 2026 📆 in beautiful Stockholm 🇸🇪 See you there ! 😉

Big news in #GlobalHealthHistory today. A species of bacterium that causes leprosy, discovered in 2008 in modern patients, has been proven to have been present in the Americas well before European arrival. More details in 🧵 below: www.science.org/content/arti... #GlobalMiddleAges #histmed #aDNA 🧪

CALL FOR PAPERS! Proud to present our phenomenally creative, challenging, inspiring TAG session-programme! Hauntology, activism, river walks, Gaza, storytelling, development-led archaeology. In short: theory in action! (so submit a paper before August 1) tag2025.hosted.york.ac.uk/en/call-for-...

As an occasional disseminator of 3D bioarchaeological data, this’ll make some mighty fine reading. 🏺

🏺 Vase Bump.